


Nothing Grows In It

by Catherine Rain (raincrystal)



Category: Suikoden I
Genre: AU, Original Character(s), Spinoff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-10-01
Updated: 2003-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raincrystal/pseuds/Catherine%20Rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aftermath of the Kalekka incident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Grows In It

**Author's Note:**

> This was written supplementary to an RP; I had personally hoped my character would accidentally destroy the town again and then be executed as a spy, but unfortunately the RP died before I could really get all the plots I was so excited about into full swing. Collaborative works, they do me no favours. Anyway, the viewpoint character of this fic was meant to be my character's sister.

**Chapter Only: Nothing Grows In It  
Ellen Vandemar Desoto, Kalekka**

      
   **October 3, 448**

 ****Marlon and I returned to Kalekka. We knew that my family’s plantation was probably in ruins, but I had to see it anyway, if for one last time. Even if it was nothing but an empty lot… I had to go. I was prepared. Marlon thought I shouldn’t see it, that it would hurt too much; but I knew that it would hurt worse if I tried to pretend that nothing had happened, that it was still there. My wild fancies would lead me to imagine far worse. No, it was not the fancies themselves, but rather the unshakable fear that the most horrifying idea I could come up with would be only a shadow of the awful truth. That was the scariest feeling, the one I had to shake by coming here.  
    As it turns out, the truth isn’t worse than my nightmares. They were pretty accurate, in fact.  
    The house itself wasn’t gone; it was burned out from the inside, hollow, windowsills hanging by a nail, walls scorched, floors broken and scuffed with clods of dirt. A passerby might not recognize it as the old Vandemar manor that stood on this ground for so many years, not with the brass fixtures melted, the curtains gone, the furniture broken, glass cabinet fronts smashed. I knew it at once; but then, I would know my childhood home if it were nothing but a drawing of squares on a paper. Blueprints. I’d know it from those. It wasn’t the regal Vandemar mansion now, but at least it was mostly whole. Some of the houses in Kalekka aren’t even that. Some are completely gone.  
    The Jowston army… how could they be so cruel? What did we—not the Emperor, but we ourselves—what did we do to them, that made them destroy us? I don’t understand.

  
     **October 4, 448  
**  
    I’ve been going through my family’s—my things, trying to see if there’s anything salvageable in the house. The Jowstonians looted most of the valuables. No silverware left, and the only paintings here are slashed and torn. The portrait of my grandfather above the mantel is wrecked. When I found it, a dagger was sticking out from his eye, and red—I don’t want to know what it really was—smeared down across his face and vest. My little sister’s paintings, the ones she did at school, are ruined too—her beautiful ethereal landscapes smeared with mud. I know she must have worked hard on them. If she were here, it would tear her up inside, wouldn’t it?  
    But I wouldn’t know, because she isn’t here.  
    Upstairs, our jewels have been stolen, too, and my brother’s hunting bow. He hadn’t touched it since he came back from his journey to the capital, but it still meant a lot to him. Some Jowstonian soldier is probably killing people with that bow right now… people like Owen. They might have died the way Owen died. How did he die? I don’t know. When we came here, the bodies had already been carted away, thank the heavens. I could not have come here if they had still been… you know, I couldn’t.  
    Marlon and I have been staying in this house. He says the structure is stable enough that it won’t fall down on our heads. I found some feather blankets in a closet that hadn’t been cut to shreds, and we bedded down on the dining room floor, which was mostly intact once we moved aside the heavy table. I remember how this room used to look absolutely enormous when I was a little girl. It looks a lot smaller now. Before we went to bed, though, we took down all the destroyed portraits of my ancestors and burned them outside. Like a little funeral pyre… but it wasn’t my long-gone ancestors we were mourning. It was my own parents, and my brothers and sisters.

  
     **October 8, 448**

    I think I’m mostly done crying by now. It’s funny how, at first, the tears get worse and worse, until you think you will get dehydrated and die, and then suddenly, you don’t want to cry about it anymore, but it hurts even worse because you know the ache will not go away.  
    Of course the crops are completely gone, burned to ashes. I wish I’d learned more about farming. I always left it to my elder brother Holden to learn how to manage the plantation, since I was getting married and moving away. Owen probably should have learned too, but he never did. And now something’s happened to both of them, so it doesn’t really matter after all. Funny how that works out… except it isn’t really _funny_ , you know.  
     There used to be a portrait of us sitting here on these back steps. I don’t know what happened to it; maybe it still exists somewhere in one piece. We were just little children then, stair-steps in age: Holden, Ellen, Owen and Ariel. Now I’m the only survivor… at least, I think I am. Holden and Owen, now, they are dead. And Ariel’s gone. After she left last year, we never saw her again. She hasn’t written to us, and no one’s written to us about her. Maybe she is also gone.  
    Oddly enough, though, I think I might have a clue as to finding out what happened to her. The reason I wrote in this diary today was that a strange gentleman came to the town. He’s moved his stuff into one of the smaller intact houses on the fringe of the area, as if he plans to live here. I don’t know why anyone would want to live here… even though the house is in mostly good condition, it’s filthy and there’s a hole in his bed.  
He doesn’t like to be talked to, I think. But he said that his name was Leon Silverberg. I think Silverberg was the name of the man who last wrote to us about Ariel. He wouldn’t answer me when I asked, so I could be wrong. But I think he might be trying to hide something. All those stony looks he gave me… and he refused to answer _any_ of my questions. At _all_. That has to mean something, right? Maybe he’s just crabby, but he has this way of looking at people that scares me. Like he’s looking right through me, and knows what I’m going to do.  
He creeped me out. I’m not going back there.

  
   **October 15, 448**

    Marlon and I talked to some traders. They didn’t know Kalekka was destroyed, and they were actually coming to trade goods with the local merchants. When they found out what happened, they turned around and went back home—not much north of here except wasteland, and heathen Jowston.  
    Oh! I found something today. A long, ripped piece of a Jowstonian military uniform, and a helmet with their insignia. They were lying on the ground as if they’d been torn off in battle… when someone was trying to escape? Or was the helmet knocked off?  
    I spent a long time looking at the way they were laid out on the ground, trying to figure out what had happened to the soldier who had worn them, but I couldn’t imagine it. Of course, I know nothing about battle.  
    I showed the remains to Marlon, and he said we should burn them. But I say keep them. Angry as I am at the Jowstonians, I want something to look at to remind me that they, too, died in battle. Otherwise it just seems incredibly unfair. I hope they took losses too. I hope they paid for every inch of our ground that they burned, ransacked, and destroyed. I hope they shed blood for every last drop of ours that they spilled.  
    Well, that’s not a very nice way to talk. I guess I shouldn’t be saying that. But I’m angry as heaven, angry as the wrath of thunder and of wind. Maybe I don’t care who I strike down. I just want them to pay. They _will_ pay.  
    I’m hopping mad, so maybe I better stop writing now.

  
     **October 16, 448**

    I feel a little better. I still want to kill those horrid Jowstonians, but I can calm down.  
    Anyway, as I was going to say, we tried turning over some of the more arable land on the advice of the traders. It doesn’t look like much is going to grow there, though. We could probably just abandon the plantation and go home—home-home, to Marlon’s estate in Yaltzi, that is—but I’m not going to lose hope. I refuse to lose hope. If I do, the Jowstonians have won, haven’t they? I won’t let that happen. I wish to _destroy_ them.  
    I did go back to Leon Silverberg’s house. I wanted to ask him one more time about Ariel, and anyway, he’s the only other person around. But also, he has a lot of military paraphernalia that I didn’t notice last time. I wasn’t looking for it before. My family has never bred soldiers, so I probably wouldn’t even have known what it was. But it was pretty much unmistakable, now that the Jowston soldier’s uniform made me think about those things. Leon has all these awards from the Emperor’s army. He doesn’t have them hung up around the room; they’re just laid out on the dresser like they’re no big deal, but he still wants to look at them.  
    So is that it? Is that what he’s hiding? Some big military career? That would make sense if he had a _reason_ to hide it.  
    Maybe he does have a reason. Maybe he knows secrets.

  
     **October 23, 448**

    It’s getting cold. Believe me, when it gets cold in Kalekka, it gets _cold_.  
    We pieced together a fireplace from the ruins of the old one and some materials we found in empty houses. At least we won’t lack for firewood. The ruins of the back porch will do, for one, as will many of the floorboards, though it’s still really a shame that we have to burn up bits of the house. I mean, they’re pieces of the _house_.  
    We decided, though, that the dining room table should always remain intact, just as a sort of monument. Even if all the other furniture gets burned up… not the dining table; it’s too important. Marlon helped me use his pocketknife to carve my name… not my married name, but the name that meant something here. Ellen Vandemar.  
    I wish my warmest clothes hadn’t burned up. I didn’t need all of them down south, so I didn’t take them all. This place is the coldest part of the Empire; it’s the gateway town to the northern mountains. All trade routes go through here. It used to be very important…  
    Of course, I guess the Jowstonian soldiers had to get through here, too. Just… they didn’t have to massacre my townspeople to do it. And then, they retreated anyway? I don’t get it. Why? What did they see?

  
   **October 24, 448**

    I asked Leon Silverberg why the Jowston army came down here, won the Battle of Kalekka, and then retreated. He said it was probably to break our morale.  
    Well, I guess that makes sense.  
    

     **October 25, 448  
**  
    I asked Leon Silverberg why our morale wasn’t broken.  
    He said to stop asking him questions; he was busy, and didn’t have time to talk to a foolish girl like me.  
    He didn’t look all _that_ busy when I came in, though.

 **  
October 28, 448**

    Leon didn’t look busy again today. He practically bit my head off telling me never to come back again.  
    Marlon says I shouldn’t go back. Faced with conduct like that, I’m not sure I _want_ to.

  
     **November 4, 448**

    I give up. Our land is useless.  
    We turned over every last inch of the plantation fields and did the experiments the traders told us about, taking parts of the soil in jars and trying to grow something, _anything_ , the hardiest winter plants. It’s useless. The soil here is completely ruined, probably for years to come.  
    I really didn’t want to give up… but there’s nothing we can do.  
    I cried all over again, giving up. That was the hardest thing… it’s like everything I was raised with, everything I owned apart from Marlon, disappeared in a clash of steel and a burst of flame. I have no kinsfolk, and now, I have no hometown. Oh, I have Marlon and his family, it’s true; and I have our pretty home in Yaltzi, but I don’t have my home. It was… my heritage. It was all that I had.  
    And now, it’s all gone…  
    Marlon says maybe in five or six years, we can come back and try to plant again. It’ll take at least that long, though, and crops will be weak even then, and perhaps they’ll always fail. Perhaps this village can never be revived. A perpetual monument to war—is that it? Forever to stand here, never to flourish, a ghost town for the ghosts of my own family. And someday I’ll stand here with them, haunting these burnt-out halls, one last Vandemar for the graves.  
    Why did it have to be Kalekka? Why my home, why my family? Slaughtered mercilessly—the end of our family name. We’re done for, forever, and all I can think is—why? Our family tree has been cut off at the very roots. We grow for a while, and then—a blade, a violent end.  
It’s a horrible metaphor, this whole plantation: the end, the decay we all tend towards. Is this the nature of humanity? We plant a town and we cannot weather the chaos. We plant a family and we are cut down. We plant a garden and _nothing grows in it_. Nothing, forevermore.  
    We call it “inhumane,” but it’s human after all.

  
   **November 6, 448**

    I don’t believe it. I just… I don’t believe it. I’m spitting nails. Leon is a traitor, a despicable cur! He’s …oh, there aren’t words to describe what he is!  
    It’s _all his fault_!  
    See… we spent yesterday setting the house in order, getting ready to leave. We were going to go early this morning and return to Yaltzi. But I thought, you know, I’d say goodbye to Leon. After all, even if he is a cranky old grump, I should be a good neighbor. Anyway, maybe my leaving would put him in a good mood.  
    But he wasn’t home. And that’s when I got the idea to snoop around just a little. See, I know he has secrets—I just know it. And if he’s done something bad, then he deserves to have it spilled as punishment. And if he hasn’t done anything bad, why then, my spying on him wouldn’t hurt a thing, would it?  
    So I went inside. And on his dresser, or, well, at the bottom of the third drawer of his dresser, but it’s all the same thing—would you believe it, I found my old jewelry box! I guess it must have been scattered somewhere far from the house. It was stained and scratched all over, but I could still tell from the shape and size and bits of lacquer that it was mine. Leon must have found it and was using it to keep things in. It was locked, of course. I never used to lock it, so I kept the key inside.  
    Of course, he had no idea that it was mine, or that I had a spare key taped to the underside of my wardrobe.  
    So, to make a long story short, I ran home and got the key, and opened the box. There were half-written letters to a bunch of very important-sounding people, generals and whatnot. See, I knew he had military secrets! And—among his letters, he had written to a General Kilawher Shulen about the success of a “Kalekka Plan”…  
    Apparently the battle of Kalekka was not a battle at all.  
    It was a slaughter orchestrated by the Empire, a massacre of its own people, to rally the populace against Jowston!      
And Leon Silverberg is the one who came up with this plan! He _killed my family_ , that atrocious, disgusting old creep!  
    I don’t think he knows that I know. I panicked, and put everything back exactly as I found it. I was so terrified, I kept thinking I heard noises at the door, and it felt like an eternity before I could sneak back home. Someone like that, he’d be capable of anything!  
What a terrible person!  
I keep turning it over and over in my mind, and it doesn’t make sense. On the face of it, sure, he wants to win the war. But why would he take such an action against our own citizens? Isn’t the entire point of it to save our lives? We grow up thinking the Empire will protect us, that the leaders try to rule well, and then… they betray and slaughter us! How is that good? How can you say, by any stretch of the imagination, that killing your own people is good…  
Although, he did say that I was right to be angry... But that’s what he wanted all along!  
I just don’t understand… Leon, the person I’ve been talking to for weeks, he killed my family. All this time, I’ve struggled and grieved, and he… he listened to me say those things, and he didn’t even blink, and he knew he was the cause of all my pain! How can it be? I can’t reconcile the images in my mind—the horrors I see at night in my dreams, the death of my family, the destruction of my home—and that gruff old man I talked to a couple days ago. How can people do such awful deeds, and yet live as normal humans do?  
Anyway, I think Marlon is almost done packing our things. It’s almost sunrise—I can see the warm reddish glow outside my window.  
I think I hear him at the door. I’ll be right back.

  
    [End of the diary.]

 


End file.
